In regards to the issue of file systems being non-searchable, it's definitely worth taking a look at compressed full-text indexes: http://pizzachili.dcc.uchile.

In regards to the issue of file systems being non-searchable, it's definitely worth taking a look at compressed full-text indexes: http://pizzachili.dcc.uchile.cl/resources/compressed_indexes_in_practice.pdf http://pizzachili.dcc.uchile.cl/resources/compressed_indexes... Under this scheme each file on disk would be stored as an index with constant factor overhead. The original file is not needed; all of the data can be decoded out of the index.